Project Category
Healthy Environments
2026 - Healthy Planet, Healthy People: Change Award recipients
Willow Worlds 2: Cut and Plant
In Spring 2024, funded by a Catalyst Award, the Willow Worlds project was established in a public park in Fife, growing willow branches to protect young trees from deer. The project aimed to assess whether living structures could offer a natural, attractive alternative to plastic tree guards.
Change Award – Healthy Environment
Scraps to suppers: Closing the islands food loop
Supported by a Change Award, the Scraps to Suppers project aims to explore how small island communities can create an affordable and sustainable food growing system by reducing waste and reliance on imported goods, and by closing the local resource loop.
Change Award – Healthy Environment
Project Year - 2026
Protecting crops and soils using waste
Vermicompost—a nutrient-rich product of the decomposition process that uses worms to aid and accelerate composting to create a mixture of decomposed food waste and worm castings—has been shown to outperform traditional compost and reverse soil damage from synthetic fertilisers.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Northmavine community composting project
The Northmavine Community Development Company (NCDC) will use their Catalyst Award to launch a new community composting scheme as part of its “Growing Local” programme to boost food resilience, reduce waste, and support sustainable living in rural Shetland.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
How Green is Too Green?
Established in 2020, Fixing for a Future is a community that looks to increase an understanding of climate change in its local community. They have established a tool library, and they host skills-sharing workshops and repair cafes at schools and libraries across East Lothian.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
The Bathgate Repair Cafe: A community sustainability study
The Bathgate Repair Cafe is a 6-month, community-led pilot project designed to research and deliver a practical solution to household waste and the cost-of-living crisis. The awarded group will establish a monthly repair hub at their community market, where a skilled fixer and volunteers will repair broken items for free, diverting them from landfill.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Finding, and overcoming, the barriers to choosing to eat locally grown vegetables in Blairgowrie & Rattray
The Blairgowrie & Rattray Development Trust’s project aims to understand what prevents local residents from choosing to eat locally grown vegetables, despite several community initiatives—such as the BaRI Store, a volunteer-run shop stocking surplus food from supermarkets to help reduce food waste and to increase the use of refill—promoting local, healthy food.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Kirrie Community Farm - Meadowland
For decades the intensification of farming has contributed to severe biodiversity loss in Scotland. This, coupled with increasing climate instability is making it more difficult to grow food in this country.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Conifers aren't just for Christmas!
Conifers make up 30-35% of our world’s forests; however, despite originating in the late Palaeozoic period and surviving major mass extinctions, they often dominate recovery ecosystems, yet 34% of the species are under threat today.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Aberfoyle Coppice Creatures
Coppicing is a traditional woodland management technique that was popular before the First World War but has been underused in Scotland since. Coppiced trees are cut at their base to encourage stronger, straighter regrowth, allowing more light to reach the forest floor and potentially increasing biodiversity by supporting a wider range of plant and animal life.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Project Year - 2025
Research into the viability and impact of an abattoir for private kill services in Lochaber
Small farms and crofters in Lochaber have difficulties accessing private kill abattoir services. This project is to research the feasibility of creating an abattoir, potentially including meat processing and sales, near Fort William for the wider Lochaber area. The objective is to improve local food systems and reduce carbon emissions. A simplified and shorten supply line could offer multiple benefits to Lochaber.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Pollinator Pals: A co-created civic arts and science project improving nature connection and biodiversity in a urban garden
The Pollinator Pals project aims to connect children aged 6-12 years with nature, belonging, and community in a socioeconomically deprived area of Glasgow.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Scran Fir Bees
Through her funded project, environmental artist Natalie Taylor will work in North Edinburgh to extend a series of existing public space artworks incorporating wildflowers to provide nectar-rich habitats and food sources for pollinators. The long-term vision is that these artworks, using large-scale text cut into the landscape, will join up to form a bee corridor across North Edinburgh.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Ecological transformation of the woodland edge at Dronley Community Woodland
Dronley Community Woodland is an area popular with walkers, runners, cyclists and horse riders, with over 20,000 visits annually. It is a multi-purpose woodland where biodiversity, timber production and recreation are equal priorities.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Colvend Lochs aquatic plant survey
The Colvend and Southwick Community Council, with the Botanical Society of Britain and Ireland (BSBI), have been funded to undertake an aquatic and marginal plant survey of the lochs in the Colvend Community Council area.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Quarter century of discovery: 25 years of bottlenose dolphin photo-identification in the Hebrides
The Hebridean Whale and Dolphin Trust hold the longest time series of bottlenose dolphin images, collected from sightings in the Hebrides since 2000. Despite this, the data has not been updated or published for nearly a decade.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Am Monadh Ruadh: A living landscape
Am Monadh Ruadh, the Cairngorm Mountains are the only sub-arctic habitat in Britain. This landscape of plateaus, hills, and glens was once far more lived-in than it is today.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
What is a sustainable cup of take away coffee?
South Seeds is a community organisation based in the South Central area of Glasgow. It works in partnership with residents and organisations within the local community to help improve the area’s appearance and feel. The group’s mission is to enable Southsiders to lead more sustainable lives.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Project Year - 2024
Exploring Sustainable Solutions for Food Waste in Island Communities
Eday, an island in the Orkney archipelago, has a small community of around 130 people. The community proposes to research and evaluate options to identify a sustainable – and possibly commercial – solution for reducing food waste in an island community.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Willow Worlds
Tree planting has never been more important than now, but in Scotland, we face the problem of overgrazing by deer.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Rebuilding Biodiversity in Campbeltown
A troubling biodiversity loss within Campbelltown has been identified by the South Kintyre Development Trust.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Thrift: Climate Conversations
Art Walk Projects aim to develop a series of public conversations with artists, scientists, farmers, landscape architects, and climatologists.
Catalyst Award – Healthy Environment
Project Year - 2023
Ecopoetics Report
Shaping sustainable food futures through education, engagement, and action for a healthy planet.
Public Learning Workshop 2023